Sarfraz Qureshi: gastroenterologist and skilled diagnostician whose keen interest in people made him popular with patients

Abstract

Ear, nose, and throat consultant Douglas Boyd vividly remembers his first professional encounter with Sarfraz Qureshi. As a general physician with excellent diagnostic skills, Qureshi was much sought after for his clinical opinion. Boyd, who was a newly appointed consultant, left a message for his more senior colleague asking for advice on a patient. When Boyd returned to the ward some hours later he found that Qureshi had already been to see the patient and gone. “That was astonishing to me,” said Boyd. At the time doctors worked over two sites—Halifax General Hospital and Royal Halifax Infirmary—and Qureshi, who had been in post several years by this point, had travelled a few miles down the road to help his junior colleague. “When I met Sarfraz a few days later, not only did he remember the patient, he also remembered her family and her interests. And that was typical of him—he knew his patients’ medical conditions but he also knew them as individuals,” Boyd said. Halifax was a friendly district hospital, where the consultants were mutually supportive, and Qureshi, whom …